Hour 3 - Brow Beat

In a moment of startling candor, Anthony Davis—now a Washington Wizard—admitted on a podcast with Draymond Green that he isn't sure his 2020 NBA championship with the Lakers counts the same as a normal one. "I want the real experience," Davis said, adding that he sometimes thinks, "Did I really win a championship?" The admission landed like a grenade in the middle of an already contentious debate about the legitimacy of the NBA's bubble season, and Ben Maller, host of Fox Sports Radio's The Ben Maller Show, was more than ready to receive it.

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Maller has long been what he calls a "Mickey Mouse truther"—someone who believes the 2020 NBA Finals, played in a near-empty ballroom at Disney World in Orlando after a three-month pandemic hiatus, should not be treated as a legitimate championship. The hardest parts of a normal postseason, he argues, were absent: no travel, no hostile road environments, no grind of going straight from the regular season into the playoffs. "It was a glorified scrimmage," he says. Davis's confession, in Maller's view, hands "a flamethrower to every Mickey Mouse truther on the planet" and settles the debate once and for all. The Lakers, he concludes, "haven't won a real championship since Kobe and Pau Gasol back in the day."

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